The Ecological Thought Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Thinking Big

  TIBETANS IN SPACE

  THE MESH: A TRULY WONDERFUL FACT

  LESS IS MORE: THINKING THE MESH

  STRANGE STRANGERS: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF COEXISTENCE

  THE POETICS OF ANYWHERE

  Chapter 2 - Dark Thoughts

  MUTATION, MUTATION, MUTATION

  LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT “SIM” CAST THE FIRST STONE

  QUEER DUCKS

  NEANDERTHALS “R” US

  LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN

  Chapter 3 - Forward Thinking

  THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF EARLY ENVIRONMENTALISM

  FORWARD SCIENCE

  FORWARD PHILOSOPHY

  FORWARD ECONOMICS

  FORWARD POLITICS: STYLES OF COLLECTIVITY

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING: THE FUTURE OF HYPEROBJECTS

  Notes

  Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morton, Timothy, 1968–

  The ecological thought / Timothy Morton.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  ISBN 978-0-674-04920-8 (alk. paper)

  eISBN : 978-0-674-05673-2

  1. Ecology—Philosophy. I. Title.

  QH540.5.M66 2010

  577.01—dc22

  2009038804

  For Claire

  Acknowledgments

  A big thank you to David Simpson, my distinguished colleague, David Robertson, and Margaret Ferguson, Chairs of the Department of English at the University of California, Davis: they’ve created a flourishing environment for me. I owe a debt of immense gratitude to Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press, for believing in me. Lindsay gave inspiring and learned advice and transformed the last two years into the most pleasant and educational writing stint of my life. Thank you to Tsoknyi Rinpoche, who influences my thinking in ways too many to enumerate. And thank you to Gerardo Abboud, for taking a group to Tibet in Fall 2007.

  Profound thanks are due to this book’s two anonymous readers. I’m grateful to David Clark for having read a draft. Marjorie Levinson helped me clarify my thinking immensely. Dimitris Vardoulakis kindly commented on the manuscript. David Robertson likewise gave encouraging and valuable advice, and so did Vince Carducci. The project received generous support from UC Davis’s Publication Assistance Fund.

  Thanks to my graduate students, especially Andrew Hageman, Laura Hudson, Eric O’Brien, Chris Schaberg, Rachel Swinkin, and Clara Van Zanten. I’m grateful to the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK), and in particular to Greg Garrard and Tom Bristow for hosting their and my first videoconference keynote speech in July 2008, low on carbon and high on philosophical exchange; to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University, and in particular Benjamin Morris and Bradon Smith; to the International Association for Environmental Philosophy; Amy Green-stadt and the Portland Center for Public Humanities; Gerry Canavan and the Polygraph crew at Duke University; Deborah Elise White at Emory University; and Stephanie Lemenager at UC Santa Barbara. Thanks to Vince Carducci for inviting me to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Fall 2007. Thank you to Ann Greer for providing a home away from home in London in Spring 2008.

  Thanks to Warner/Chappell, Alfred Publishing and the Richmond Organization, for granting permission to reproduce lyrics by Roger Waters for the Pink Floyd song “Echoes” from the album Meddle (EMI, 1971), in the epigraph for Chapter 2; © Copyright 1971 Warner/Chapell and the Richmond Organization (TRO-© Copyright 1971 (Renewed), 1976 (Renewed) Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York, NY). Used by permission.

  Thank you to my terrific research assistant, Sara Anderson. Thanks to Ron Broglio, Kurt Fosso, and Ashton Nichols, collaborators on a stimulating Romantic Circles blog on ecocriticism; and to readers of my blog ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Thank you, too, Ruth Abbott, Sha-hidha Bari, Jeremy Braddock, Nathan Brown, Patrick Curry, John Davie, Fran Dolan, Elizabeth Fay, Svein Hatlevik, Caspar Henderson, Srecko Horvat, Douglas Kahn, Peter King, Claire Lamont, Mike Luthi, Glen Mazis, Jacob Metcalf, Colin Milburn, Jasmine Morton, Ava Neyer, Derek Parfit, Arkady Plotnitsky, Kate Rigby, Michael Rossington, Scott Sher-show, Jane Stabler, Ted Toadvine, Robert Unger, Karen Weisman, Patricia Yaeger, Michael Ziser, and Slavoj Žižek. A heartfelt thank you to my wife, Kate, who as ever thought, walked, and talked this project through with me. All the errors herein are my responsibility alone.

  I dedicate this book to my daughter Claire. Thinking about her takes me into realms of the unspeakable, just like the ecological thought. They are realms of unspeakable love.

  Infinity overflows the thought that thinks it

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Introduction: Critical Thinking

  The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy—for some, strangely or frighteningly easy—to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.

  We usually think of ecology as having to do with science and social policy. But as the poet Percy Shelley said, regarding developments in science, “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”1 Ecology seems earthy, pedestrian. It’s something to do with global warming, recycling, and solar power; something to do with quotidian relationships between humans and nonhumans. Sometimes we associate ecology with fervent beliefs that are often explicitly religious: the Animal Liberation Front or Earth First! To the extent that we don’t yet have a truly ecological world, religion cries aloud in a green voice.2 But what would an ecological society look like? What would an ecological mind think? What kinds of art would an ecologically minded person enjoy? All these questions have one thing in common: the ecological thought.

  As the success of the 2008 Pixar masterpiece Wall•Edemonstrated, the question is on everyone’s mind: what is ecological awareness?3 How do we restart Spaceship Earth with the pieces we have to hand? How do we move forward from the melancholy of a poisoned planet? Wall•E begins several hundred years into the future, with the depressing scene of a little garbage-compacting robot piling skyscraper-high towers of human detritus. There’s something wrong with “his” software, something that manifests as an obsessive collecting. It looks like he’s searching for some key to humanness among the Rubik’s Cubes, the video of Hello Dolly, the tiny sprout in a flowerpot. Wall•E happily shows that the “broken” software, the mental disorder of the little robot, is the viral code that reboots Earth: this time around, we evolve from memes, not genes. Yet isn’t his obsessive compulsion, so like a manifestation of grief (from where we sit in the cinema at least, spectators to future ruin), exactly our situation right now? How do we begin? Where do we go from here? Is that the sound of something calling us from within the grief—the sound of the ecological thought?

  The ecological thought is a virus that infects all other areas of thinking. (Yet viruses, and virulence, are shunned in environmental ideology.) This book argues that ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power—and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with capitalism and with what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder. It has to do with doubt, confusion, and skepti
cism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with race, class, and gender. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence.

  Like the shadow of an idea not yet fully thought, a shadow from the future (another wonderful phrase of Shelley’s), the ecological thought creeps over other ideas until nowhere is left untouched by its dark presence. 4 Darwin trusted the theory of evolutionary impermanence so much that he was prepared to suspend his disbelief in continental permanence, although in his day there was no tectonic plate theory.5 Such is the force of the ecological thought. As one philosopher put it (see this book’s epigraph), “infinity overflows the thought that thinks it.”6

  You could think of The Ecological Thought as the prequel to my previous book, Ecology without Nature. What must I have been thinking in order to realize that in order to have “ecology,” we have to let go of “nature”?7 You can’t make a prequel until you have made the “original” movie. In some strong sense, the ecological thought rigorously comes afterward—it is always to come, somewhere in the future. In its fullest scope, it will have been thought at some undefined future point. You find yourself caught in its tractor beam (it’s like a mathematical “attractor”). You didn’t mean to. You must have been thinking it all along. But you had no idea. The ecological thought sneaks up on you from the future, a picture of what will have had to be there, already, for “ecology without nature” to make sense.

  Like archaeologists of the future, we must piece together what will have been thought. Ultimately, the ecological thought surpasses what passes for environmentalism. It thinks otherwise than small-minded, and big-minded, manipulation. It goes beyond thinking “How many other living beings must we kill in order to be around next winter?” It goes beyond “Whatever is, is right.”8 It goes beyond “Let it be, let it be.”9 It goes beyond self, Nature, and species. It goes beyond survival, Being, destiny, and essence. Yet like a virus, like the lowest of the lowest (are they even alive?), like the tiny macromolecules in our cells, in our very DNA, the ecological thought has been there all along.

  Why “ecology without nature”? “Nature” fails to serve ecology well. I shall sometimes use a capital N to highlight its “unnatural” qualities, namely (but not limited to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery. Ecology can do without a concept of a something, a thing of some kind, “over yonder,” called Nature. Yet thinking, including ecological thinking, has set up “Nature” as a reified thing in the distance, under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild. One of the things that modern society has damaged, along with ecosystems and species and the global climate, is thinking. Like a dam, Nature contained thinking for a while, but in the current historical situation, thinking is about to spill over the edge.

  Ecological thinking might be quite different from our assumptions about it. It isn’t just to do with the sciences of ecology. Ecological thinking is to do with art, philosophy, literature, music, and culture. Ecological thinking has as much to do with the humanities wing of modern universities as with the sciences, and it also has to do with factories, transportation, architecture, and economics. Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence. No man is an island.10 Human beings need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each others’ environment. Thinking ecologically isn’t simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me.

  Why call this book The Ecological Thought? Why not An Ecological Thought or Some Ecological Thoughts? Or more modestly, Notes toward Ecological Thinking? Or just Ecological Thought? Of course there are ecological thoughts. And this book has no monopoly on ecological thinking. But there is a particular kind of thinking that I call the ecological thought. It runs like a strand of DNA code through thousands of other kinds of thoughts. Moreover, the form of the ecological thought is at least as important as its content. It’s not simply a matter of what you’re thinking about. It’s also a matter of how you think. Once you start to think the ecological thought, you can’t unthink it: it’s a sphincter—once it’s open, there’s no closing.

  THE SCOPE OF THE DAMAGE

  Modern economic structures have drastically affected the environment. Yet they have had an equally damaging effect on thinking itself. I don’t mean that before now we thought ecologically and properly. The ecological thought in its full richness and depth was unavailable to nonmodern humans. Even now, on the brink—over the brink, indeed—of climate catastrophe, we’re only just capable of glimpsing its magnitude and profundity. The modern age compels us to think big, in the words of the first chapter. Any thinking that avoids this “totality” is part of the problem. So we have to face it. Something about modern life has prevented us from thinking “totality” as big as we could. Now we can’t help but think it. Totality looms like a giant skyscraper shadow into the flimsiest thought about, say, today’s weather. We may need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means something closed, something we can be sure of, something that remains the same. It might be harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. It’s a little humiliating. This “concrete” infinity directly confronts us in the actuality of life on Earth. Facing it is one of the profound tasks to which the ecological thought summons us.

  We’ve gotten it wrong so far—that’s the truth of climate disruption and mass extinction. I don’t advocate a return to premodern thinking. The ecological thought is modern. The paradox is that the modern era—let’s say it began around the late eighteenth century—impeded its own access to the ecological thought, even though the ecological thought will have been one of its lasting legacies. As far as ecology goes, modernity spent the last two and a half centuries tilting at windmills. The ghost of “Nature,” a brand new entity dressed up like a relic from a past age, haunted the modernity in which it was born.11 This ghostly Nature inhibited the growth of the ecological thought. Only now, when contemporary capitalism and consumerism cover the entire Earth and reach deeply into its life forms, is it possible, ironically and at last, to let go of this nonexistent ghost. Exorcise is good for you, and human beings are past the point at which Nature is a help. Our continued survival, and therefore the survival of the planet we’re now dominating beyond all doubt, depends on our thinking past Nature.

  Modern thinkers had taken it for granted that the ghost of Nature, rattling its chains, would remind them of a time without industry, a time without “technology,” as if we had never used flint or wheat. But in looking at the ghost of Nature, modern humans were looking in a mirror. In Nature, they saw the reflected, inverted image of their own age—and the grass is always greener on the other side. Nature was always “over yonder,” alien and alienated.12 Just like a reflection, we can never actually reach it and touch it and belong to it. Nature was an ideal image, a self-contained form suspended afar, shimmering and naked behind glass like an expensive painting. In the idea of pristine wilderness, we can make out the mirror image of private property: Keep off the Grass, Do Not Touch, Not for Sale. Nature was a special kind of private property, without an owner, exhibited in a specially constructed art gallery. The gallery was Nature itself, revealed through visual technology in the eighteenth century as “picturesque”—looking like a picture.13 The “new and improved” version is art without an object, just an aura: the glow of value.14 Nature isn’t what it claims to be.

  While we’re on the subject of Nature and “new and improved” upgrades, this book makes a rigorous distinction between environmentalism and ecology. By the time you finish, y
ou may feel that there are good reasons for advocating not just ecology without nature but also ecology without environmentalism.

  In Reflections on the Edge of Askja, Pall Skulason tells us why we need Nature:To live, to be able to exist, the mind must connect itself with some kind of order. It must apprehend reality as an independent whole ... and must bind itself in a stable fashion to certain features of what we call reality. It cannot bind itself to the ordinary world of everyday experience, except by taking it on faith that reality forms an objective whole, a whole which exists independently of the mind. The mind lives, and we live, in a relationship of faith with reality itself. This relationship is likewise one of confidence in a detached reality, a reality which is different and other than the mind. We live and exist in this relationship of confidence, which is always by its nature uncertain and insecure.... [This] relationship of confidence ... is originally, and truly, always a relationship with reality as a natural totality: as Nature.15

  It isn’t hard to detect in this passage the violent, repetitive actions of someone desperate to restart a broken machine. Skulason cranks handles, attaches jumper cables, rolls it down a hill ... it’s not just what he says or even how he says it. It’s the attitude with which he says it, the “subject position.” From the tone of hope and fear, you can tell that the game is up and that he knows it. He is indulging in magical thinking: “If I just keep saying this in the right way, it’ll be okay. Nature will exist.” The desperation is legible in the sheer amount of writing. It goes on and on, waiting for something that never comes. It’s Nature writing reduced to Waiting for Godot: “I must keep going. I can will Nature into existence, write it into the script.” Skulason is trying to cheer us up in the middle of the slow motion disaster we’re facing. The more he says, the worse it gets.